A haunting on Holden

The story you’re about to read is true. Nobody’s name is changed and nobody is innocent.

When I was a kid growing up in the vibrant, sin-filled metropolis of Fayetteville in the late ’60s and early ’70s, my grandfather would regularly take me on weekend trips to exotic Greensboro, where his brother and sister-in-law lived on a poultry farm at the intersection of Friendly Avenue and Holden Road. My great-uncle Olan Barnes had owned that farm since the surrounding land was countryside rather than suburbs, and although the city had grown up around him, he was grandfathered in and allowed to raise chickens and geese and pigeons until he died in 1975.

The house still stands, but the land behind it is overgrown with kudzu, and from the road there are no obvious traces of the chicken runs or pigeon coops. I’m told that these days it’s owned by a local doctor who rents it out to Guilford College students. When I met one of those students back in the mid ’90s, she told me the house had a female ghost in the attic. You might find that a significant detail, in light of the events I’m about to relate, but truth to tell, almost every old rental house in Greensboro is said to have a ghost by the college students who live in it, and for some reason those ghosts are always female and prefer attics.

I loved the visits to the farm, even though I was a bit freaked out the first time Uncle Olan deftly picked up a chicken, snapped its head off with a single twist and dropped it, watching it stagger around in circles and chuckling at how “that damn fool thing still has more brains than any damn Democrats.” Once the chicken collapsed (which might take some time), he would pick up the headless corpse, dip it in scalding water to loosen the feathers and then hand it over — it was my job to pluck it for our supper that night.

I wasn’t disgusted or horrified by this. Even as a small child, I understood that the food we ate came from animals, and was fascinated rather than disturbed by the connection between a drumstick and the carcass it had once been attached to by gristle and sinew. Whenever my mother cooked a turkey or a capon, she would always show me the liver and heart and giblets and explain how each functioned in the living fowl. She once put a brace of Cornish game hens (a phrase, which she explained to me, was nothing more than a euphemism for “a little chicken barely out of grade school”) on her hands and make them “dance” on the tabletop for me.

That didn‘t bother me, and the plucking and cleaning of a recently living bird‘s carcass held no horrors. What did bother me was the way a decapitated chicken could still stagger around sans head, a spasmodic reflex that became downright terrifying after one flapping fowl came stumbling right at me with blood bubbling from its neck, seeming to chase me no matter which way I turned, until it finally collapsed in a twitching heap.

Rather than being sympathetic to my terror, my usually taciturn uncle laughed, saying, “Don’t be such a sissy-boy, Ian Keith, the damn thing can’t exactly peck you any more, can it?”

Life was hard for the poor chickens on my uncle’s farm, in more than just the usual ways. Olan owned a friendly (well, to me) drooly pitbull bitch named Ginger, who lived in a chain link run beside the chicken coop.

Every so often an unlucky chicken would fly over the fence and into Ginger’s territory. No, she wouldn’t eat it or tear it to shreds, Instead, she buried it, taking apparent care not to injure it in the process, leaving behind a small mound of earth with the poor chicken’s feet sticking out of it like a headstone.

My uncle liked to joke that Ginger was trying to grow herself a chicken patch. If he found one of Ginger’s victims while the smothered bird was still relatively fresh, we ate chicken stew that night.

Ginger and my uncle weren’t the only chicken killers who lived on the farm. There was my Aunt Virginia’s rangy black tom cat, who’d lost an eye and half an ear in his battles with chickens over the years (roosters are pretty damn tough).

When he was just a kitten, the cat had been named, ahem, “Niggerman,“ just like in HP Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,“ but my mother told my great-aunt that she didn’t want me hearing the N-word, and thus the cat was rechristened Tar Baby. My uncle hated Tar Baby for the way he kept killing chickens (oddly enough, he generally left the pigeons, which should have been much easier prey, alone) and continually threatened to shoot him or feed him to Ginger, but my Aunt Virginia would then sweetly say, “Olan, anything happens to that cat, I’ll invite my sister Margaret to come live with us.” That always shut him up.

Now, Tar Bay may have hated chickens, but he loved me, and whenever I visited, he spent the night on the pillow beside my head, purring like an electric engine.

One weekend when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, I’d come with my grandfather on one of his regular visits to Olan’s and Virginia’s. I forget what I’d done that day, but I’ll always remember that night.

The house was old and drafty and creaky, full of heirlooms and dust. The guest room I slept in was on the third floor (fourth if you count the basement, which was actually ground level around back, as the house was built on a steep incline). I was supposed to be sharing a bed with my grandfather, but he preferred to fall asleep in the big recliner in front of the floor-model Westinghouse television in the second-floor living room, while I’d go upstairs to read myself to sleep after wrestling (or as my grandfather called it, “My fights”) and “Shock Theater” with Dr. Paul Bearer were over. We’d rooted together for Johnny Weaver against the likes of Rip Hawk and Swede Hansen, and Grandad would nod off during the horror movie. Once “Island of Terror” or “The Gorgon” (Channel 8’s version of “Shock Theater” always seemed to be showing one or the other) was over, I’d put the comforter over my snoring grandfather and pad up the groaning stairs to bed, Tar Baby purring as he snaked around my bare feet.

So there I was, alone in the wee hours in that high, creaking room under the attic eaves, Tar Baby purring in my ear, drowsing off while reading a book of horror stories from Whitman Classics (a line of small, cheap children’s hard-covers that were sold in the toy sections of department stores) called More Tales to Tremble By. I still own this excellent little anthology of horror stories, which cost 69 cents at Woolworths and which was my introduction to such classics as Saki’s “Srendi Vashtar,” HR Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge” and MR James’ “Casting the Runes.”

When my eyelids got heavy, I put the book on the end table, laid my glasses beside it, and switched off the light. Sometime after that, I’m not sure how much later, I became aware that someone else was in the room with me.

For most of my life, I’ve been troubled by dreams, or apparent dreams, in which I’m lying in bed, apparently still awake, and a dark form enters the room. In my childhood days, the form was usually a menacing one, a monster or boogeyman, and I’d awaken with a shout or a scream. A few years later, it would be a female one, sometimes that of a girl I knew and had a crush on or lusted after. In those later waking dreams, the figure (which was generally a silhouette, but which I could “see” far more clearly that I would actually have been able to see anyone or anything in a dark room while not wearing my glasses) would remove articles of clothing as it approached, and I often felt more frustration than relief at the way I always woke up before she either got completely naked or actually climbed into the bed with me. This apparition may have been a harbinger of those hormonal adolescent fantasies, but it was neither erotic nor tantalizing.

The whole experience was much clearer and more detailed and coherent than my usual dreams, and at no time did I think, “Oh, I must be dreaming.” I could feel my beating heart, hear my own breath and the creaking of the ancient house around me. And the figure was more than just a silhouette.

That house stood, as it stands now, at a busy intersection, and there was a streetlamp on the corner of Friendly and Holden. Filtered through the tall trees that surrounded the house, that light formed a pale rectangle on the bedroom wall. I “awoke” conscious of someone in the room with me and immediately knowing it was not my grandfather or my aunt or uncle.’ And when that figure stepped in front of the pale rectangle of light, it was more than just a shadowy form.

It was a woman, dressed in a long dark old-fashioned dress with a high neck, and a pale apron with dark stains on it. The light illuminated her from the shoulders to just below the knees, so that I couldn’t see her head or her feet.

Standing silently there, she began to undress. It wasn’t a striptease (not that I’d seen one at the time). There was nothing lascivious about it. She undressed like someone preparing for bed at the end of a long and draining day. First the stained apron came off, then layer after layer of clothing, including a girdle and bloomers, until at last she stood there nude.

She didn’t look like any nude woman I’d ever seen or thought about. At that age I’d never actually viewed a naked woman in the flesh, but I imagined them a lot, and sometime sketched them in the secret drawing pad I kept behind my bookshelf. In doing this, my primary model was Playmate of the Year Marilyn Cole (yes, I was actually able to remember her name without looking her up on the delightfully named www.boobpedia.com). Her “hot librarian” photo spread in my father’s hidden magazine had been burned into my subconscious, and was invariably what appeared behind my eyelids whenever my hormonal imagination conjured up on undraped female form.

But that’s not what happened in this case.

The female figure that had begun undressing in the guest bedroom of that creaky old house was nothing like Marilyn Cole, nothing like a Frank Frazetta cave girl, nothing like Ursula Andress in Doctor No. She had wide hips, meaty thighs and small, floppy breasts. Much like a typical nude in a late 19th century photograph, albeit even fleshier and older.

She began to walk towards me. As she padded closer to the bed, the rectangle of light from the window moved her up her body, illuminating the place where her head should have been. There wasn’t even a stump, just a depression between her shoulder blades.’ That fleshy hollow where her neck should have been was darker than the rest of her exposed flesh, but without the wetness suggestive of a wound or the rough texture of a scab.

I did four things more or less at once. Woke up (assuming I’d been dreaming and this wasn’t really happening). Hurled the cat curled up beside my head at where the headless apparition was standing. Switched on the light. Fumbled for my glasses.

There was nothing there. Just Tar Baby, crouched stiffly in the middle of the floor, glaring at me with his one eye in way that seemed to say, “What the Hell is your problem?”

Then he sat down and began to lick his own balls (he was not a neutered tom cat), before stalking back to the bed, jumping up beside me, and sitting with his head pointing away from me and his ass in my face, which was his way of getting back at me for throwing him like that. But he was a forgiving sort, at least with me, and in a few minutes he was curled up and purring again.

I never said anything about this dream, if it was a dream, to my aunt or uncle or my grandfather. They weren’t of the sort whom a boy could talk to about a naked woman, nor I was the sort of boy who could talk about such a thing with anybody. If she’d not been nude, sure, but there was something about the word “naked” that sealed my lips.

Decades later, when my grandfather and my Uncle Olan were dead and my Aunt Virginia had sold the farm and moved into the Quaker Friends home, I attended the party where I met the girl who said she lived in that house. When she told me it was haunted and that the ghost was that of a woman. I asked her if the ghost had a head. She said she didn’t know, that she herself had never seen it, and that those who claimed they had simply described brief glimpses of a female form in a long trailing dress disappearing around corners. On one of my last visits to my Aunt Virginia in the Friends Home, I asked her about this, but she was badly failing at that point and couldn’t give me a coherent answer.

Do I actually think I saw a ghost? No, I do not, at least not in the daylight, or when I’m sober. I’m very much aware of the vagaries of memory, and of how one’s subconscious can lead one to construct coherent and detailed narratives from badly recollected and impressionistic scraps. Last year I was reading the World Question Center website, where a variety of leading scientists and intellectuals were asked “What have you changed your mind about?” For neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, it was the fundamental nature of memory:

“Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning.”

It’s true that, if my childhood self had been asked to sketch a naked woman, that mini-me would have made a crude attempt at a Frank Frazetta cave girl or a buxom Playmate. So, no, the apparition didn’t have the kind of female body my 12-year-old imagination would have conjured up. And before she disrobed, she was wearing a long dark dress of the sort that the students who later lived in that house described.

But this doesn‘t convince me. As LeDoux says, memories aren’t a digital video loop that plays back over and over again in the same form. Today, and 10 years ago, upon thinking back to that night, I “see” the body I’ve sketched in here, but that doesn’t mean I really “saw” it that way then. I have the writer’s instinct to make stories detailed and convincing, and I suspect this “memory” has mutated quite a bit in the many years since it happened.

Still, I’ve found myself thinking about it in the last couple of years, and I sometimes think of trying to find out who’s living in that house now and asking them what they’ve heard and seen and dreamed while under that creaking roof.

Ian McDowell lives in Greensboro. E-mail him at ianmcd@mindspring.com.